So, last time we left off we had just entered the Abandoned Mines, where the local bomb merchant said that the miners had recently vanished. Here, too, he said we could obtain some bombs that we would need on our quest. The Mine is the first real dungeon of Oceanhorn, and therefore it really isn’t all that bad. It’s certainly reminiscent of a nice dungeon romp in a Zelda game, with little nooks to explore, a couple secrets to find, and enemies to slay. The puzzles here are pretty straight-forward and the boss (a pair of giant centipedes) isn’t all that bad, and as expected, our prize at the end is the bomb item.

After completing the dungeon, we see a letter in a bottle wash up on the beach where someone claims to be a prisoner in the Withered Lands and needs our help. Good timing, that – we were going to head there anyway, since the Hermit said that the Owru, who used to live on the Pirta Continent, were the keepers of the Emblem of Earth. The Withered Lands are interesting – a vast desert area to explore and a fortress to get through. Not wanting to spoil too much, I’ll say that the prisoner is quite interesting, teaches us a magic spell, and tells us the location of the shrine where the Earth Emblem should still be kept.

This shrine will be our next location of interest, but you’ll have to wait for Episode III to see what happens there!

The game’s name pretty much tells you what to expect from Quest 64 – a rather generic RPG that isn’t even worthy of more of an original name than simply “Quest.” As sad as this game’s name might be, I actually read up on the game and found out that in Europe it was released as Holy Magic Century (odd, sure) and Eltale Monsters in Japan. Both of those names would have been better than Quest 64.

The game was released back in 1998 and was developed by Imagineer and published by THQ. I remember playing the game way back then and getting a bit through it, but never really getting far in it. I think my opinion back then was that, despite having nice visuals and overall fast gameplay (e.g. no real loading time like on PlayStation discs), the game was bland and there were too many RPG offerings on the PlayStation to spend time on and thus wasting time on this one wasn’t a worthwhile effort. Yet, I decided to give the game another look to see how it stacks up all these years later.

Well…Honestly, I did have fun messing around with it for an hour or so, and so my initial impression is that the game isn’t that bad. It’s certainly not fantastic either, and has a rather generic story with pretty basic gameplay. Still, it’s serviceable and made me want to press on to make it to the first castle to see where the story would take us. Honestly, even though parts of the game are indeed bland, the game is probably worthy of an average score. I’ve played enough RPGs released in the last few years, particularly those released on the PC, that were far more bland than this game was, so I can’t fault it all that much.

It is rather impressive the scope of the game given the technical limitations of its presentation. Still, I think Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage might have been a greater technical achievement, but that game wasn’t released until 2001 and really made use of the console’s hardware.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little adventure into Quest 64, and stay tuned – more awesomeness is coming soon!

I remember back in the mid-90s when I first found out that the SNES version of Dracula X wasn’t the only Castlevania game to have that title. In fact, it was basically like a dumbed-down version of a much better experience that was only released in Japan for the PC Engine (TG-16 CD in the US) in late-1993. Dracula X: Rondo of Blood is the 1993 prequel to 1997’s amazingly-popular, genre-defining game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, set five years before that game’s events. It tells the story of Richter Belmont’s battle against the newly-revived Count Dracula, and even the SNES version was a real treat to play.

The PC Engine version of the game is a much longer experience. The music is all CD-quality, the graphics are very crisp and vibrant, and the gameplay is dead-on with what you’d expect from a classic platformer in the series. What’s also very cool about Rondo of Blood is that you can also play as Maria Belmont (who is another bigger character in Symphony of the Night), who brings her own strengths and weaknesses to the table…But only after you rescue her.

In any event, my good friend Greg from Destroy All Fanboys sent me an email yesterday talking about a very limited fan-produced “special edition” of the game called Akumajou Draculs X: Belmont Survival Kit. Produced by PCE Works, this special box set includes their digipack version of the game in an awesome wooden box with blue velvet lining, a replica wooden stake, a wooden cross necklace, a metallic sticker, and a Dracula X pin. All of this, though, is a bit costly, running at 219 Euros (including shipping).

Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas first made its appearance on iOS devices back in 2013. I actually had no idea this game existed at all until early this year when doing a search for Zelda-style games on other platforms. Naturally, I was pretty sad to find out that the game was never ported outside of iOS. Yet, as luck would have it, about a week or so after that I received an email about the game noting its impending release via Steam!

Anyway, I played through a large portion of the game and reviewed it back when it was new and then took a long break from it. Recently, I opted to get back into it, but after some thought (discussed in the intro of this video!), I decided to turn it into a Let’s Play series! :)

In this first episode, our adventure begins (after a quick cutscene) on Hermit Island. We learn about our character’s past, a bit about our father that left some time ago, and learn the basics of the game. After our father’s past catches up with us and strange creatures attack our little home, the Hermit tells us a story about sacred emblems that might have the power to weaken Oceanhorn. Seeking them, he says, may be the key to finding our father and defeating this ancient evil.

We set sail to Tikarel Island where we add a few new locations to our sea chart, explore a bit, and then set sail for Sandbar for a quick pit stop. Finally, we head to Bomb Island, where a very necessary upgrade can be found. The Mines will be the first real dungeon of the game, and so I end this video at the entrance to that dungeon. Next time around, we’ll explore it and hope to tackle the dungeon’s boss and find more clues on where to go next!

So, we finally arrive at the final video of Gatling Goat Studios’s Traverser, and though the game is relatively short (an average play might be 3 to 4 hours), the game does surprise pretty well with things along the way.

Last time, we left off with Valerie needing to sneak into President Foss’s mansion to find her father and figure out what was really going on. Doing so isn’t as terrible as it seems, though. Basically, we just need to sneak around the house, jot down some symbols and such we find on suits of armor, and find a cypher that explains how they are used to open the door and get the key to the father’s cell. Of course, even with that done, things end up going south and we get locked in prison ourselves. So, from that point on, we work on escaping, freeing the prisoners that are locked away there, fighting a rather cool, cybernetic boss, and then making our way back to Raven HQ to take on Foss in a final battle.

The final fight is pretty crazy, but I manage to beat it on my first try. Then, finally, we get to open the door that leads to the surface…But, what’s up there? You’ll just need to watch to find out!

I will admit that the ending was a bit disappointing to me. Maybe, though, they left it ambiguous to leave it open to a sequel or prequel. Who really knows at this point, but for now, it’s left mostly for us to fill in the blanks.

Well, with Traverser out of the way, I have plans to start a new series on Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas (2015), so stay tuned! :)

Well, here we are at the grand finale of Alcahest – an awesome Japanese action-RPG for the SNES from back in 1993.

What’s really neat here is that although the last two stages feature boss rushes of a sort, with pretty much no real healing between battles (though yeah, you could grind enemies for healing drops), the bosses are actually upgraded and more powerful than when you first encountered them. In fact, on several occasions I found myself getting my butt kicked and was close to wanting to just quit, LOL. But, I managed to study these upgraded forms and persevere and get through them. Yet, in hindsight, I know that this would have been easier if I had actually gone back at the end of Stage 7 and went to the black pillar to use the metals we got from the bosses to summon the Guardian Mail. In fact, frankly, I’m surprised that the Guardian Mail wasn’t required, but I’m pretty confident that it would have raised our defense pretty significantly and we wouldn’t have had to heal nearly as much as I did in those last few battles.

Ah well, live and learn! In either case, I got through it, and had a lot of fun!

Sometimes, it’s a little challenging to simply be “satisfied with what you have” in the world of PC gaming. Most likely, this is because of the sheer availability of tons of fun tech toys and new technology that creeps its way onto the market almost every day. It can be tough on your pocket book and your sanity, though, and sometimes the incessant need to upgrade does feel a bit artificial.

Just got that new 1440p monitor? Try out this newer 1440p display with 144Hz refresh!

Just got that nice, new 4K display? Try this 5K one with cinematic wide-screen!

Honestly, though, when it comes to displays, being happy with the screen you have is very important. You want one that looks and feels right for you, is the right physical size for your desk or wherever you will be using it, has a high enough pixel density to create crisp, clean images without causing severe eye-strain while looking at small text and details, and, for us gamers, which has a good response time and great color fidelity (the latter of which is also important for graphic designers and photo editors, among others). Because of this, some upgrades feel a bit more useful than others. For a lot of people, having a nice 23″ 1920×1080 display with a 60 Hz refresh rate and a decent response time will be enough. Really, at the distance at which most people view their screens, a size like 23 or 24″ with a 1080p resolution is more than enough. Things will look clean and crisp and the screen won’t be so big as to cause you to have to look around to see everything. Spending the money to purchase a 4K (3840×2160) display will be worth it to some, but mainly I think this should be reserved for larger-format displays. The purpose of higher resolutions (at least in the TV world) is to keep an image looking crisp at a much larger panel size. On a 40″ screen, 1080p might look very nice, but at the same viewing distance with a 65″ screen, details might start getting fuzzy because that same pixel resolution is spread out over a much larger surface. But, when it comes to monitors, the ability to multi-task is also important.

Well, LG has upped its game recently by getting into the ultra-wide HD field, releasing a series of ultra-wide monitors that display content in a stunning 21:9 aspect ratio. Having seen lots of videos of gaming at this resolution, as well as tech reviews showing off all the neat things you can do with all that extra screen space, I decided I really wanted one. And, after finding a fantastic deal where I could get the LG 29UM55 for under $250 (MSRP as of this post is $399.99 USD), I had to go ahead and pull the trigger.

So, what’s it like?

First thing’s first: the LG 29UM55 is pretty much plug-and-play. There is included software (in my case, the disc containing it was not present, but a very quick visit to the LG website remedied this with no problem) that works to facilitate a four-screen split, but this installs quickly and is unobtrusive, and certainly isn’t bloatware. The screen has options for HDMI, DVI, and Display Port/Thunderbolt. For myself, I picked up some high-bandwidth HDMI cables from MonoPrice (useful for these higher-resolution formats) and it worked like a charm. Right out of the box, I felt that the colors were well-balanced, the brightness was well defined (I bumped it up slightly though to full brightness), and very few things needed to be tinkered with. This is unusual in my experience because a lot of manufacturers miss the mark right out of the box. Again, most people won’t care that much about that, but for those of you who (like me) are concerned with producing accurate colors, LG meets your needs.

The panel of the 29UM55 is an IPS one, and normally those have a bit worse of a response time when compared to a higher-speed LED one. Yet, this one actually advertises a 5ms response time and comes with options in the on-screen display to tweak those settings. The four options that were present were “Off” (bad response time), “Low,” “Normal,” and “High.” On High, the difference seems negligible versus the middle setting but there is some “reverse ghosting” present. In other words, the response appears to be a bit too fast. I followed the advice of a few folks online and kept it set to the middle setting and have been very pleased with how it displays fast-moving content.

One of the concerns with a non-standard aspect ratio (at least non-standard as of this article!) is in the displaying of “normal” 16:9 content. When viewing a traditional 1280×720 or 1920×1080 source, the 29UM55 uses black letter-boxing on the sides of the screen and centers the remaining image. This is best equated to viewing a 4:3 TV show on a modern 16:9 HD TV. In the case of a rare few games (mostly unoptimized indie ones), the content is stretched horizontally to fill the rest of the panel, producing less-than-optimal results. On the flip-side, because of its ultra-wide panel, this display can show movies in their full, original cinematic format, removing all letter-boxing and having them fill the entire screen without warping or stretching or cropping the image. That, I think, is pretty awesome.

One of the built-in features of the monitor (e.g. no software required) is the ability to accept two simultaneous input sources and display them side-by-side on the screen. This is useful for someone who wants to plug a laptop in and see its desktop while also still interfacing with their main PC, or maybe for someone that wants to plug a game console in, be able to play that game (at 720/1080p) and still be able to see their desktop and, say, chat with their friends or have a guide open. Really, there are a lot of productivity options available to you with a feature like that. Then, using the LG software suite, you have the ability to pick four sources and have them displayed separately on the screen at one time. This is a true example of a productivity-minded production, and the possibilities are endless. You could have a browser open, Word open, Steam open, and maybe a game running, all at the same time, and all in high-definition. As my friend Greg joked, you could even try to play four 720p games at one time, just for the heck of it!

It’s worth noting that not all games currently support a 21:9 aspect ratio. Most do, but a small handful don’t at this time. Sometimes, the field-of-vision and all the graphics will properly render and show you a much larger world, but the UI may end up stretched or not looking quite like it should. Yet, most major developers are on-board with 21:9 and so this is rare in my experience so far. Indie games, on the other hand, due to budgetary considerations, can be a bit hit and miss. In some cases, they cater to the standard 16:9 crowd because that’s where the overwhelming majority of their players will be, so you may have to deal with either a stretched image or a centered 1920×1080 (or whatever you select in 16:9) output.

In terms of retrogaming, though, a lot of games use prerendered graphics and as such there’s nothing to gain from 21:9 rendering. Yet, for more modern titles where the games were actually rendered on the fly, a lot more is possible. The Dolphin emulator has no problem taking a GameCube or Wii game and rendering it with a much wider field of vision for you and, frankly, the results are amazing.

Finally, if you zoom in on this very-zoomed photo of the screen itself (showing the sub-pixel array), you can tell that there is a lot more to the panel than just the usual Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) pixel format. Aquos, as you know, boasts four colors (adding in a Yellow sub-pixel to some of their displays), which creates a richer depth of color. With this LG screen, a keen eye will notice six colors in the above photo: Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta. In the on-screen menu, you actually have the ability to fine-tune how all six of these sub-pixels display, allowing you even richer options in terms of color calibration and attaining a true-to-life photo quality.

Additionally, having more sub-pixels to work with allows for better and more accurate resolution scaling to higher “effective resolutions.” Whether or not this means something to you, though, will just depend.

With a $399.99 suggested price tag, this screen seems like a worthwhile upgrade. The pixel density is very nice for a 29″ screen, the wider field of vision allows you to do more productivity-wise as well as enjoy games and movies in a much more immersive manner. LG also offers a 34″ variant of this same display (the 34UM65), retailing currently at $699.99 (though it is on NewEgg right now for only $529.99). For those wanting a massive upgrade, $899.99 can get you their 34″ 3440×1440 WQHD screen. Keep in mind though that, beyond the large amount of money to get that one, it would require even more processing power to maintain your games at an acceptable frame-rate (another issue with 4K and why people seem to be going other directions in their display upgrades).

For my purposes, I am very satisfied with the LG 29UM55. It’s also a display I feel highly confident in recommending to you if you are looking to purchase a new, high-quality monitor for your set-up!

This week for my contribution to Game Creation Station on Zero Friction, I discuss the idea of putting puzzles and other complex challenges in my Zelda: Sword of Moria fan-game. This leads to an interesting consideration on just how difficult it is to create worth-while challenges, and what challenges are actually fun versus the ones that are simply annoying!

So far, I’ve had a lot of fun with Traverser. It’s been something different and refreshing to play. The art style is wonderful, the story has its lighter moments but also has a gritty feel to it, and it’s an engaging game that makes you want to come back for more.

The sad thing is that, like a lot of games, I think it’s not all that long. In fact, I think after this video here there might only be one (maybe two) episode(s) left to record. But, that’s not necessarily a bad thing and the game is fun and has a bit of a replay value to it.

Last time, things left off with us having ventured through the sewers and finally came across a giant octopus that was blocking our way. This time, after a few attempts, I manage to bring the beast down and get us into the Lower City. It’s here that we see both literally and figuratively how the “other side” lives, and we also get some insight into the motives of the rebels, the plot they have, and we gain information on the whereabouts of Valerie’s father.

Next time, we’ll explore Foss’s mansion and find out how all of this stuff really plays out!

I kind of have this love-hate relationship with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. On the one hand, even in its original 4:3 format from 2003 on the GameCube, it’s a stunningly-beautiful game. The gameplay is fun, the sailing was a unique add-on, the story is compelling, and the world presented is entertaining and fun to explore. Yet, on the other hand, I found the way the game ends rather upsetting. Minor spoiler: The King of Hyrule could have literally wished for anything, yet what he instead chose was probably the worst thing he could have done!

But…Life goes on! Still, I think the way the game ended is the reason that I hadn’t revisited it in over a decade, but, in deciding to take another look at it, I figured that doing so with the Dolphin emulator would be a fun way to do it!

I recently picked up a brand-new large-format LG monitor that uses ultra-wide HD with a 21:9 aspect ratio. This gives a much larger field of vision in games and even lets you watch movies in their true cinematic format with no more letter-boxing. Dolphin actually handles this format well, and when it renders games it actually does widen the field of vision so that more is seen on-screen. Sure, some of the UI gets stretched a bit and looks slightly funky, but overall the picture is super crisp and wonderful looking. In many ways, I’d say it’s better than what Nintendo actually produced themselves in Wind Waker HD on the Wii U!